A friend recently asked us
about a word that he only partially recalled. It began with al- and
was an archaic navigational term. "Aha!", we said,
"That sounds as if it could be an Arabic word." So we ran a
source-language query on the Oxford English Dictionary on CD-ROM (visit our Book
Store if you'd like to compete). Here
are a few of the gems and surprises which this search uncovered. [Note
that many of the words begin with al-. This is because al
is Arabic for "a" or "the".]

English
word

English
meaning

Arabic
origins

alcove

A
recess; especially if vaulted

al
the + qobbah, "a vault, vaulted chamber"; from qubba,
"vault".

alembic

1.
A distillation apparatus

2. A brand of electric
bass guitar

al-anbiq,
"a still"

alfalfa

A
variety of clover

alfaçfaçah
"the best fodder"

algebra

1.
The surgical treatment of fractures

2. The department of
mathematics which investigates the relations and properties of
numbers by means of general symbols

al-jebr,
"the reintegration or reunion of broken parts", from jabara,
"to reunite"

Algol

A
star of the constellation Perseus

al
ghul, "the ghoul"
(see also ghoul)

algorithm

(originally
algorism)

1.
The Arabic, or decimal system of numeration; hence,
arithmetic.

2. A computational
process, or set of rules

al-Khowarazmi,
(i.e. the native of Khwarazm), surname of the Arab
mathematician Abu Ja'far Mohammed Ben Musa, who flourished early in
the 9th century, and through the translation of whose work, on
Algebra, the Arabic numerals became generally known in Europe.

Alhambra

A
palace in Granada, Spain

al-hamra,
"the red (house)"

alkali

A
class of chemical compounds

al-qaliy,
the "calcined ashes" of the plants Salsola and Salicornia,
from qalay "to fry, roast in a pan"

Oh yes, just in case
anyone was wondering, we found our friend's word for him. It was almucantar,
"small circles of the sphere parallel to the horizon, cutting the
meridian at equal distances; parallels of altitude." OK, so we
have strange friends...

Your
Etymological Queries Answered

From
Sally Bush:

In
conversation I referred to a British subject as a Limey and my boss asked
me "What's a Limey?" After informing him I began to wonder
about the origins of the word. It's not a put-down as far as I am
concerned, but I'd hate to offend any of my friends from the UK if it is
considered otherwise by the "Limeys".

If
you suddenly succumbed to general debility of the body, extreme tenderness of
the gums, foul breath, eruptions of the skin and pains in the limbs I imagine
you would be a little worried. You might even think that you had
contracted one of the terrible viral infections that are currently making the
rounds of the planet. These symptoms, however, are what you can expect if
you get no vitamin C in your diet. The condition is called scurvy and, at
one time, was common among sailors on long sea voyages who had to live on salted
foods.

Long before vitamins were
recognized as being essential to the diet, medical officers in the British navy
noticed that even extreme cases of scurvy cleared up rapidly if the sufferer ate
citrus fruits. The Royal Navy therefore instituted the practice of
carrying stocks of limes and giving each sailor a daily ration of
lime-juice. This resulted in British ships being called lime-juicers
by U.S. sailors. Over time, the scope of the term was extended to include
the British sailors and, eventually, all Britons.

The word scurvy, like its
older synonym scorbute, derives from Middle Low German schorbûk,
"belly-burster" (MLG schoren, "to break, lacerate" + bûk,
"belly") a graphic description of the final stage of the
condition. Any substance which counters scurvy is called an anti-scorbutic.
There is, for instance, an anti-scorbutic plant of the cabbage family called scurvy-grass
(Cochlearia officinalis) and in former times people drank the anti-scorbutic
tonic called scurvy-ale. We now know that the reason the anti-scorbutics
worked is that they all contain vitamin C. Chemically, vitamin C is known
as ascorbic acid which literally means "no-scurvy" acid.

Just to put your mind at rest,
Limey is no longer considered offensive but, originally, it was intended as an
insult. Personally, we think that all those scurvy American sailors (with
their foul breath and skin eruptions) were just jealous that the British sailors
had no trouble getting dates.

From Jonathan
Heinzen:

What
is the etymology of widow's
peak?

Peak
is, essentially, the same word as pike and beak, all of which
refer to something that has a projecting point. In days of yore, widows
wore a distinctive hood with a pointed piece in front, called a biquoquet.
By analogy, if a man's hairline recedes, leaving a peak in front, or if a man's
or woman's hair grows into a point at the center of the hairline on the
forehead, this is called a
widow's peak. Curiously, there is also another expression, a widow's
lock, meaning a lock of hair (on a woman) which grows apart from the rest of
her hair. This is supposed to be an omen that she will be widowed early.

From Kimm Kiefer:

The
word sallyport is used by law enforcement officers across the nation for
the location in a jail facility to which arrested persons are dropped off.
Why?

We assume from your use of the term
law
enforcement
officers (not police) and your spelling of jail (not gaol)
that "the nation" of which you speak is the
U.S.A. (this is the world-wide web, you know).

A
port is simply a doorway or gate, from the French port,
"door" and originally from Latin portus, "a harbor"
(a country's harbors are, in a sense, its doorways). Latin also has
the verb salire, "to leap", which is the ancestor of our word sally,
meaning an armed military excursion.

So,
what's this got to do with jails? Well, most medieval cities were built
with substantial fortifications so that they could withstand a siege, but what
if those within the city wanted to attack their besiegers? There was a
very real danger that the act of opening the gate to let soldiers out would
also give the besiegers an opportunity to enter. [Hang on, we're nearly
there.] The solution was to construct a sallyport, a heavily
fortified, double-gated portal. The force of soldiers would enter the sallyport
through its inner gate which would then be closed behind them. When the
outer gate was opened they would sally forth, then that gate would be
closed. When they returned, the opposite procedure was observed.

The
sallyport used in jails is constructed similarly to its medieval
namesake, with two strong gates enclosing a small inner area.

From Donalyn:

I'm
curious about the word cahoots, as in the expression "I'm in cahoots
with her." I've used this expression and everyone knows what I mean but we
can't seem to find the origin of the word. Can you?

Well,
seeing that you've thrown down the gauntlet like that, we simply had to try but,
for such a simple word, there is very little definite that we can say about its
origin. Many authorities cite a word for a small cabin, either the
French cahute or the Dutch kajuit. Thus, to be in
cahoots with someone meant, literally, that they lived together in a confined
space and implied close cooperation. Alternatively, it could possibly come
from the Latin cohort, "a body of infantry, one tenth of a
legion", via the French word cohorte.

Surprisingly,
the earliest recorded examples of the term have "in cahoot
with". Why it should have picked up a final S is
unclear. Also, we found one solitary example of cahoot as a verb:
"They all agree to cahoot with their claims against Nicaragua and Costa
Rica." - New York Herald, May 20 1857.

From Janice
Bryant:

Wow, I enjoy your site immensely. I have currently run out of books that interest me in the
local and my personal library and find this site vastly entertaining as well as educational.
I was reading the archives and ran across 'nob' as meaning head, and wondered about its
relationship with hobnob.

No, it has
nothing to do with heads but it's quite fascinating, nonetheless.

First
we must look at the Old English words hab and nab. Hab
is thought to be the present subjunctive form of have with nab (n-
+ hab) as its negative form. Thus habbe ich, nabbe ich meant
"whether I have or I have not". Nowadays, hab and nab
survive only in the dialects of Devon and West
Somerset in the
phrases hab or nab, hab nab and habs-nabs. As one
might expect, these phrases all mean "get
or lose, hit or miss, succeed or fail".

By
Shakespeare's day the phrase hob, nob had progressed from its literal
meaning of "to have or have not" to mean "give and take" and
he used it in this sense in "Twelfth Night". Another shift of
meaning occurred around 1750 when hob or nob, hob a nob, or hob and
nob came to refer to two persons drinking to each other. To drink
hob or nob (or hob a nob) meant to drink toasts to each other
alternately or to take wine with each other with clinking of glasses. There is
also an obscure noun, a hob-nob, which is a toast used when hobnobbing
(although in Britain, Hobnob is a brand of cookie).

The
next change of meaning came around a century later (c. 1850) when hobnob
lost its specific reference to alcohol but retained its connotations of intimacy,
good-fellowship and close companionship.

where Malcolm Tent
proclaims that it is

definitely not
definately

One of the most common
spelling errors I see is this: definately. If you want to
spell that word correctly, just remember that there is a finite way
to spell definite.

Some other misspellings I
see now and again seem to occur due to the loss of the "t" sound
within words, especially here in America. For example, we
Americans pronounce congratulations as congradjulations.
It's no wonder that many people spell the word c-o-n-g-r-a-d-u-l-a-t-i-o-n-s.
Similar pronunciation of the name of a facility called the Inter-Community
Hospital resulted in it being spelled as Inner-Community Hospital.
It's a wonder that the word knight has survived with that spelling
for so long (it was knyght in the 14th century - close enough), seeing as it isn't
pronounced phonetically any longer!

Regarding the origin of "Xmas" mentioned in
Issues 65 and 66, I thought you would be
interested to know that the "San Fernando Valley Folklore Society's Urban Legends Reference Pages" identifies the
X in Xmas as the symbol for Chi rather than the Christ cross. The specific web page is
located at http://www.snopes.com/holidays/xmas/xmasabbr.htm.
They also disagree with your description of the origin of the insulting gesture of extending one's middle finger. You mention it in
Issue 39 near the bottom (the topic was originally raised in
Issue 25. Their discussion can be found at http://www.snopes.com/spoons/faxlore/pluckyew.htm.
Thought you'd be interested.

Thanks, W. (or, as we'd say in
Texas, "Dubya"). In the case of the discussion you cite
regarding "pluck yew", we see no disagreement between that
discussion and ours. As for the X in Xmas being a chi
or a criss-cross (Christ's cross), we will, after having conducted
further research, concede defeat: the X in Xmas is in fact a chi.
We blame excessive holiday merry-making for this error!

By
the way, we're happy to see that you all made it to the year 2000.
Happy new year!

From Dick T.:

I have to agree with the sharp Ms. Dwyer's points about the unusual 99-year
century. It is odd, indeed. Perhaps I am just too ignorant to understand why
this century should be shorter than the last 19. As to skinny-dip, you report that it was first put in writing in 1966. This
seems very late to me. I'm sure I heard it at least 10 years earlier - and
it seemed to be an established expression even then. Surely SOMEBODY wrote
it down before the mid-60s.

Barb Dwyer says,
"You're not ignorant. Mass media has simply promulgated, quite
successfully, a bit of misinformation. However, we all know that
everything in the media is true, so... Are you free tonight,
Dick?"

And we say, regarding skinny-dip,
that it may well have appeared in print before 1966, but the first known
occurrence in print dates from 1966. If you can find an earlier
example, drop us a line and we'll put you in touch with the powers that
make a note of such things.

From Tony Lyons:

I've just seen a reference to
brogue in Issue 50's Spotlight (Aug 99). According to Dineen's Irish - English dictionary, the word "brogue" comes from the Irish word
barróg, which among other things, means a person with defective accentuation, such as somebody speaking a foreign language might have. So when we have a native Irish speaker
using wrong or unconventional accents on English words, he could be said to speak with a
barróg, or brogue. I enjoy your website very much.

This is in fact one of those
contentious word origins. While it is widely suggested by Gaelic
scholars, there is no evidence to support the notion
that brogue comes from Irish barróg. Most
etymologists suggest that, if the word does come from brogue
"shoe", the sense is one of "the speech of people (Celts)
who wear brogues", as that type of shoe was worn mostly by
Celts. We're pleased to hear you enjoy the site!